This groundbreaking book, an important contribution to Naomi Mitchison criticism, examines three novels, The Bull Calves (1947), The Big House (1950) and Lobsters on the Agenda (1952), and a selection of short stories, with particular regard to the supernatural, fairy-tale and mythical content which is a recurrent element in her work. Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) was a highly practical person - a social and political activist, a feminist and a pacifist - yet was drawn to the idea of an 'irrational' dimension to life, and reported inexplicable experiences from her childhood onwards. An...

n the fast disappearing slums of the Claggans district of a big Scottish city, only a few tenements still stand. In this strange half-world a small group of men and women live out one hot summer week of their lives. Experience is heightened by the presence of a maniac among them-a man whom some of them at least must know, a sex killer who already has his eye on his next victim and is planning to strike again. But this is in no way a whodunit. It is a warm and human story of the loves, fears and hopes of simple people: of Mrs Sheehan, feeling lost and useless with her family grown up and gone;...

In this unusual and accomplished novel, Naomi Mitchison retells in realistic terms and colloquial dialogue the story of the passion and death of Jesus, hour by hour, as it unfolds over the 24 hours of Good Friday.

Volume two of Naomi Mitchison's 'Essays and Journalism' is devoted to the West Highland village of Carradale, to which she moved in the late 1930s. She writes about many aspects of Carradale: her farm, the local fishing industry, the big garden which was particularly dear to her heart, and 'the village and the Big House'.

The south side isn't just a location, a neighbourhood, an area on a city map. In these brilliantly perceptive novellas, all set in Glasgow, it stands for the flip-side of the psyche, the darkness behind the facade. The title story, The South Side, with its echoes of the Bible John murders, finds Matthew, newly widowed and remarried, glimpsing and trying to deny events from his past which he has repressed for years. Machinery deals compassionately with an elderly woman whom others might describe as a neighbour from hell. The magical realism of Below takes Belle, a feisty bag-lady, on a...

This collection, which Naomi Mitchison published in 1957, is recognisably a 'Carradale book', containing as it does vivid and realistic stories and poems of the landscape and the people. Mitchison had moved to the village in Kintyre, on the west coast of Scotland, some twenty years before and was still much involved in its affairs, supporting the fishing fleet and running her own small farm. Yet, as Moira Burgess suggests in her Introduction to this new edition, these thirteen stories and fourteen interspersed short poems and songs do not make a straightforward, celebratory, collection. The...

Early in Orcadia was first published in 1987, and consists of five stories, set hundreds of years apart in time and dealing with different characters, but connected by their location in a particular corner of Orkney during the period known as the Stone Age. Mitchison links them formally by interpolating passages of fact and explanation between the fictional episodes, and by speculating in her own voice about what happened in prehistory, as far as it can be known from archaeological research, and how it fits in with the world of today. The slightly awkward jumps from one story to the next...